ZenZui. Eh.
So the world is a twitter with ZenZui, Microsoft’s spinoff company with a new phone interface for surfing the web. Check out any of those links and watch the video of it in action, then come back. I’ll wait… I don’t really understand the fuss about this, it’s pretty and cool for sure, but it’s a widget manager not a new way to browse the web, it isn’t even a new interface to the various phone functions. The functionality it provides is limited, so now you can browse your bookmarks with a nice zooming interface and basic finger motions. Did Microsoft really spend lots of money, R&D time and make a whole company out of this web launcher app?
So, the touch screen part doesn’t seem particularly easier than using a directional pad (provided the phone has one), it doesn’t make any use of velocity or anything, you make one step per touch. Compare this with the iPhone’s scrolling capability which also takes the speed of your twitch to determine the speed of the motion, you can not replicate this with a directional pad. As far as I can tell the key element of this that is new is that you can zoom in and out of the tiles, which is cool and useful for what it is.
What it has done is this, it trades making the user take an increased number of actions (now you have to zoom into your final set of 4 large tiles before you get to see it) for larger hot spots on the screen (if you had only the small tiles on your phone, it would be harder to hit them). I think it’s a reasonable trade off, but I’m not bowled over and if ZenZui confines the widgets you get to use to ones they provide you with, as a web interface it’s almost going to be a non-feature, I’m totally fine just using bookmarks in a browser to get to the sites I want to get to. On the other hand if there’s some kind of auto-discovery feature to pull the tile it will use in that interface (the way there is for favicons) as well as an easy way to add the site to it, that’d be a reasonable bit cooler. I guess it’d be a fancier bookmark manager.
The one interesting thing I read was on their site:
If you’re a developer, bring your coolest mobile app ideas to life using our SDK (available summer 2007), and publish your best Tiles into the ZenZui Ecosystem. If it’s hot, it’ll get sponsored, and we’ll pass along a share of the advertising revenue (we believe in sharing the love). Or, if you’re not out to make a buck but just want to flex your talents of self-expression, just select “Ad-Free” when you publish, and we’ll pair-up your Tile with a message from a non-profit. That way, you can help us create a new mobile channel for community awareness and support charitable giving. At ZenZui, we believe good karma = good business.
So it seems that they won’t confine the widgets to paying content providers, but will open it up to anyone. I am assuming these are widgets that basically repackage online content. I’ll be curious to see if this revenue sharing model will actually pay off enough to get people building the widgets.
So my official reaction is cool, but you know, whatever.
